The Book of Thomas - Volume One: Heaven

by Robert Boyczuk

  Releasing my shirt, she turned back to the bags of lime, and pushed another four over in quick succession. I didn’t look, but some, at least, must have hit their mark, for Ali appeared to be satisfied. “Let’s go,” she said, setting out at an unhurried pace.

  I followed numbly, a hand on my stinging cheek.

  We circled the tower for the last time, moving above suns, and I realized those black oblongs had turned to grey. Dawn was upon us. We climbed farther until we rose past the lower edge of the Assumption and were surrounded by its featureless walls.

  At the peak of the tower the ramp levelled, then jutted out so that it seemed to hang over nothing; at its brink was a raised wooden drawbridge. I looked to where the bridge, when lowered, would meet the wall of Assumption, but there was no sign of a doorway. Drawing her sword, Ali slashed the thick ropes holding the bridge aloft, and it swung ponderously down to the horizontal, where chains secured to its end snapped taut, arresting its progress centimetres from the wall. Seams split the wall where the bridge met it, and a door, no different than the doors in the other Assumptions I’d travelled, swung inward, framing a darkness as black as an unrepentant soul. Ali turned to me, beautiful and frightening in the sombre light. “Heaven waits.”

  I confess I never thought we’d make it this far. And I had little faith that if we did, we’d find a way into Lower Heaven. Meussin had told us she believed the Angels had plans for us; and Ali had told me the Angels would grant us sanctuary. Yet I found myself faltering on the doorstep. My sins were many and weighed heavily upon me; I knew my soul was not prepared. If I were to enter Heaven now, I thought it likely I’d have no chance for redemption. Crossing that threshold seemed to me akin to stepping into eternal damnation.

  I turned; the point of Ali’s blade hovered centimetres from my throat. She backed me onto the bridge. “I know what you are thinking, Thomas, and you need not worry. If you enter Lower Heaven, you will not be judged. There will be plenty of time for more hand-wringing about your sins. Or, if you prefer, I can kill you right now and let God judge you as you stand.”

  She was right about my fears, but only partly so—there were other reasons I was reluctant to enter Lower Heaven, ones which I’d rather not share with her.

  “What’s it to be?”

  I liked neither choice she gave me. Or a third she hadn’t: I could cast myself from the bridge. I would still be judged, but at least Ali would not have the stain of another murder on her soul. I turned and walked to the door. At the other Assumptions, there had always been lit torches and Jesuits waiting. Here, only undifferentiated black. Without looking back, I said, “I’m sorry for what I did.”

  I waited, but she said nothing.

  Unable to bear her silence, I swung around. Her sword was still raised, only she stared at me not with the hated or scorn I’d expected; rather, it was a look of pity. “You needn’t be sorry,” she said, “I don’t blame you. If I had, you’d have been dead long ago.”

  I don’t blame you.

  Why is it that we desire most what we can’t have? Or is that the crucible of desire itself? I desired Ali, more than I’d desired anything. Meussin had told me flatly my feelings would never be reciprocated. Yet, in the novels she so loved, there was no lack of spurned suitors who ultimately won over the object of their desire. I know now how naive this must sound, but it gave me hope, even though I’d already realized that, like the Holy Book, these fictions told us what we wanted to hear. In the Bible is evidence of an all-seeing father, one who loves us, and forgives us, despite our flaws. How could one not want such a father? And so I convinced myself there was hope with Ali, and built my case on the slimmest evidence—a look, a word, a casual gesture—something, anything, to show she might harbour some latent affection for me. And when one looks this scrupulously for a sign, one is bound to find it, whether it is there or not.

  Perhaps that’s why I said, “I love you.”

  Ali’s face contorted into equal measures of astonishment and disgust, and I felt my heart plummet as if it had been torn from my chest and cast over the side of the bridge. She lowered her sword until its tip rested on the deck of the bridge. “Christ Jesus, save us,” she said, then straight-armed me.

  I staggered backwards and tumbled into oblivion.

  Heaven

  Experience is ofttimes the better teacher, and such was the case with the Jesuit’s lesson: Your body has grown in the context of a certain gravitational acceleration, and so its systems depend on this to move your fluids. Changing the gravity too quickly would disrupt the flow of these fluids and cause you to lose consciousness—or worse. In crossing the threshold into the greatly diminished gravity of Lower Heaven, I’d fainted.

  Opening my eyes, I saw the shadowy arch of the Assumption’s corridor looming over me. I tasted bile, and my head throbbed cruelly. I don’t think these were entirely the effect of the sudden change in gravity, for as I lifted my head from the stone flags, a spike of pain emanated from a single spot on the crown of my skull; I touched the place and felt the stickiness of blood. Ali, was my first thought: she must have struck me as I lay prone. With my addled wits, it took me a moment to realize this would have been impossible. She, too, would have lost consciousness as she stepped through the doorway. The momentum from her shove had done the damage.

  I lifted my head slightly higher—and the corridor wobbled around me. When the sickening movement of the world dwindled to a slight rocking, I saw Ali next to me, out cold. Her breath was uneven and her face looked pallid and puffy. I placed my fingers on her throat (something I’d never dare do if I thought her conscious) and was rewarded with a steady pulse.

  I was incredulous. Somehow, we’d passed into Lower Heaven and were not dead.

  But what Lower Heaven had not taken, the Gardes would. I looked around the gloomy corridor. The door was wide open, and outside, the deck of the bridge was in shadow as the light of the sun shone up from the last Sphere of men. I knew that I had only a few moments to shut the door before the Gardes arrived. I had an idea about who had opened the door—and if I was right, I also knew it wouldn’t shut unless I sealed it myself.

  I tentatively pushed myself into a sitting position; a fresh wave of giddiness washed over me, but passed more quickly this time. Girding myself, I gained my legs. My head spun and my stomach wanted to heave its contents, but I managed to cling to the wall. I felt incredibly light, as if I could float away. My muscles, attuned to a much higher gravity, might easily fool me into stepping too far or too high, overshooting the mark, and a fall here would just as likely result in broken bones as it would in the lower Spheres since my mass was the same. I touched my head lightly, where it had hit the stone flags.

  Dragging my feet along the floor, not daring to lift them, I fought the temptation to move faster; even so, my progress kicked up a pall of slow moving dust that quickly coated the back of my throat, tasting of an age of disuse.

  This, I thought, is not the Heaven I expected.

  Reaching the threshold, I cocked my head to listen. There were no sounds of pursuit, just a high-pitched ringing that seemed to have taken up permanent residence in my ears. I pulled Ali’s legs clear of the door, then touched it where I had seen the Jesuits touch it. The black panel swung shut and sealed itself, choking off all light. The air did not stir, and in a moment of blind panic I fancied myself suffocating. Calm yourself, I thought. Even if there is not much air to breath, you can open the door anytime you wish. This comforted me, but I still couldn’t help wondering if I’d just sealed us in a tomb.

  Feeling my way along the wall, I moved back to where Ali lay, then let myself slide down next to her. I thought of how I had dissuaded her from fetching the lamp before we’d entered the sewer, and recognized myself twice the fool for it now.

  I considered our situation, and saw only three options: I could leave Ali here and look for help; I could carry her and seek help; or I could wait for her to regain consciousness. I decided to carry her. Until now, al
l the Assumptions I’d been in had the same layout. If this one did as well, I should be able to navigate the darkness. I crouched, carefully worked my arms under Ali’s shoulders and knees, and lifted her with remarkable ease. As light as she was, carrying her was sometimes awkward in that confined space, and I worried that her head or feet might strike some object invisible to me; so I moved sideways, her feet in front, and my back scraping along the wall, to keep my balance in the vertiginous dark.

  As in the other Assumptions, this corridor led directly from the platform to a weighing room. My fear had been that the door between the two would be barred from the inside, like it had been in Rome, but it was wide open, swung back against the inner wall and canted on a slight angle, as if it had been torn away from its top hinge. My confidence buoyed; in the other Assumptions, there was only one more door we needed to pass through to reach the outside gates, and that door had always been barred from the side we were now on. The gates, however, would be a different matter. The Assumption was clearly neglected, and if either of the portcullises were down, and the winches inoperable, it might not be possible to raise them.

  I worked my way around the edge of the room until I found the door. It was closed, but not barred. I laid Ali on the floor, lifted the latch, and pulled.

  Blinding luminescence flooded the room, and fresh air rushed past me into the crypt of the inner Assumption. It took my eyes a moment to adjust. When they did, I saw an inhumanly tall figure, stooping beneath the iron spikes of the raised portcullis. It was naked and hairless, with a massive, distended chest that ran from shoulder to pelvis, and its limbs were thin and elongated. Here and there on its pallid body were long, red ulcerations and patches of discoloured skin, like those I’d seen on the diseased beggars in the streets of Los Angeles Nuevo and Rome. If it had a sex, I couldn’t tell, for where its reproductive organs would have been hung a flap of skin, like a loincloth. On the left side of its skull was a large, distended growth, which no doubt accounted for the peculiar position of its head, cocked like a bird’s. It regarded us implacably through milky white eyes, which had no irises. What was most remarkable of all, however, was that rising above the figure’s head, and visible behind the latticed grill of the gate, were the curves of its great folded wings.

  It held aloft a lamp in which burned a trinity of unnatural white flames. They were round rather than tapered, and did not jump or flicker, unlike the bright yellow flames of every other lamp I’d ever seen.

  “Zeracheil!”

  Ali must have crawled from the weighing room, for she was on her hands and knees beside me, swaying. “I have done as I promised,” she said, then vomited. Bile spattered my sandal.

  But the Angel’s eyes remained fixed on me. “Do you have faith?” Its voice was neither a man’s nor a woman’s, but something in between. So, too, its face, which, had it not been marred by the lesions and that growth, would have been astonishingly beautiful—or handsome, if you prefer. Both words seemed equally inadequate.

  Unable to speak, I nodded.

  “Good,” said the Archangel Zeracheil, then swung around awkwardly in that space too small for it, and hobbled toward the light of Lower Heaven.

  As Ignatius had warned me, Lower Heaven was both more and less than I’d imagined.

  We stepped from the Assumption—Ali’s arm over my shoulder for her support as much as mine—and found ourselves atop a hill. I was struck by the sheer scale of things. We’d been taught that this was the largest of all Spheres. What the Priests hadn’t told us (or perhaps didn’t know) was that the distance to the firmament, which by my reckoning had increased slightly as we’d risen from the Apostle John’s Sphere to that of Saint Peter, more than doubled here, and the suns were at least a kilometre above. The openness thus produced unnerved and disoriented me. I felt exposed, as if a protective mantle had been stripped away, and I wondered if this was akin to how Adam and Eve felt at the moment they lost their innocence and learned shame.

  The second thing that struck me was that ordinary things, like trees and grass, grew taller here, perhaps twice the height they did in the Apostle Peter’s Sphere below.

  Other than that, the rest of the scene was unremarkable, even mundane.

  There was no road outside the gate, or sign that there ever had been one; just a field of unusually tall, sere grass running down to a creek. Beyond that, an endless, overgrown wood, looking no different (save for the unusual height of its trees) than the forest through which we’d travelled in the Sphere below. I’m not sure what I’d expected, but I felt disappointed by the ordinariness of it all.

  Next to me, Ali clutched her stomach and doubled over, retching again. Perhaps it was a sympathetic response, but I, too, was battered by a wave of nausea, and felt my gorge rise; I tightened my throat to keep my last meal down.

  “You feel a natural disorientation,” said Zeracheil. “It may last anywhere from a few hours to a few days. If you cannot walk, you may use the litter.” The Angel pointed. Near the wall of the Assumption was a large palanquin with two poles; the platform itself was bare and carved from a single piece of oak. Despite the lack of bearers, the whole thing floated a metre above the ground. I would have been astounded to witness such a miracle—if we’d not been in Heaven.

  I helped Ali onto the platform. It didn’t move, not even a centimetre, as if it sat upon legs firmly anchored in the ground.

  “Would you ride, too, David?” The Archangel Zeracheil towered over me.

  “I . . . I would like to walk. I think it will help.”

  “As you wish.” The Angel’s manner of speaking was slow and oddly distracted, as if its attention was divided between this and another plane of existence. “You may find it easier by holding the poles. If you feel faint, they will bear your weight.”

  I did so, and was grateful for the support.

  “You may push, and the litter will move. If you tire, let us know and we will do what we can to help you.”

  I leaned forward a bit, and the palanquin moved.

  “This way,” Zeracheil said, and began walking around the periphery of the Assumption, moving like an injured bird, the tips of its frayed wings dragging along the ground.

  I followed, and would have fallen at least twice, had I not had the poles to cling to. Each step carried me farther than I wanted, and this disrupted the rhythm of walking my body had come to expect. I tried to adjust the length of my stride to account for this strange buoyancy, but still found myself slipping and sliding—worse, I started to fall backwards on extended steps. So I stopped striding altogether, and hopped, feet apart, pushing off on my back foot and landing on my front. It seemed to work reasonably well and was far less dangerous than trying to walk.

  I caught up to Zeracheil as he turned the corner on the opposite side of the Assumption. “May I ask a question?”

  The Archangel stopped and nodded, a somber dip of a head twice the size of my own.

  “When are we to be judged?”

  The Angel, its head still cocked, stared at me—or, rather, through me to some other place. “When you die.”

  I was not dead; leastways I didn’t think I was, for my heart still beat, and my head throbbed with the ache of the living. “Then we are not to be judged?”

  “All men are judged,” Zeracheil said, “when they die.”

  I glanced at Ali to see what she made of this; although she seemed better, she stared off into the middle distance, rubbing her temples and showing no interest in the exchange. “But must we not be judged to enter Heaven?”

  “You are here, are you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then the answer to your question is no.”

  The relief I felt was tempered by unease at the strangeness of Zeracheil’s answers—it was my first inkling that the minds of Angels ran differently from ours. I had more questions, but worried that in asking I might discover I’d misunderstood what the Angel had already said. I preferred to believe that I still had a chance of redemption. So
I left my questions unasked.

  Zeracheil turned and hobbled on, stopping on the margin of a narrow dirt track, the sort that wild game make. The path snaked down through the grass and disappeared into the forest. “Follow this to the house of Zeracheil,” the Angel said, in the same affectless tone it said everything.

  “Are you not coming with us?” I asked.

  “We cannot travel farther.” It indicated the wood that lay between, and I took this to mean the path was too narrow to accommodate its height or the span of its folded wings. “Stay on the path and beware the animals. They are unaccustomed to man.” It unfurled majestic wings, throwing us in shadow.

  “Wait!” I shouted. The Angel stood over me, its wings slowly collapsing onto its back. “What about those who were following us?”

  “The door is closed,” the Angel said. “They are barred from Lower Heaven.”

  “They would not have built the tower unless they believed they could breach the Assumption.”

  “God made them, and they cannot unmake themselves. They do what they must.”

  I didn’t understand the Angel’s cryptic answer. Nor its fatalistic nonchalance on the cusp of an invasion. “You must know they mean to take Lower Heaven.”

  The Angel’s wings lifted in a perfunctory shrug. “If it is God’s will.”

  “Don’t you care?”

  Zeracheil showed no expression. “God made us. We do what we must.”

  I’d come here at the urging of people who wanted to aid the Angels. But the Angels—or this one, at least—seemed indifferent to their own plight. I essayed no response, and Zeracheil must have taken this as a sign the conversation was at an end. It spread its great wings again; they beat heavily, throwing mad swirls of dust into the air. I closed my eyes against the miniature storm. By the time I opened them, the Angel was already over the wood. As awkward as it was on the ground, in the air it was the embodiment of grace. I watched it recede.